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Deadtime Stories #1
Terror in Tiny Town
Willy's train set in the basement comes alive after he adds Hurley the Hobo to his collection of tiny toys
121 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1996
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336 people want to read
About the author
A.G. Cascone
27 books23 followersThe team of Annette Cascone and Gina Cascone, sisters.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
October 7, 2022
This was my first Deadtime Stories book, and also the first in the series.
A miniature model town comes to life during a thunderstorm and plots to take over the househould, led by Hurley the Hobo as seen on the cover.
There really isn't much else to this other than that very premise. No rhyme or reason. The toys come to life with minimal explanation and wage war on our characters Willy and Zack.
It was okay...
There's really not much to be said about this but it wasn't bad. The writing was fine for it being a Goosebumps knockoff, but the subject matter wasn't really suspenseful or all that engaging. I am curious to check out some of the other books in this series though.
2⭐
A miniature model town comes to life during a thunderstorm and plots to take over the househould, led by Hurley the Hobo as seen on the cover.
There really isn't much else to this other than that very premise. No rhyme or reason. The toys come to life with minimal explanation and wage war on our characters Willy and Zack.
It was okay...
There's really not much to be said about this but it wasn't bad. The writing was fine for it being a Goosebumps knockoff, but the subject matter wasn't really suspenseful or all that engaging. I am curious to check out some of the other books in this series though.
2⭐
February 14, 2017
I jokingly call this 'knock-off Goosebumps', but to be honest, it was actually pretty good. I'd say better than some of the later Goosebumps books. The action started right away, honestly - no thirty pages of build-up, which is nice for a 120-page book. I liked it. I look forward to reading the other few Deadtime Stories I own.
May 8, 2017
Solid 4 stars
Fun, full of action, and wasn't expecting that ending actually.
Review on my blog at Here.
Fun, full of action, and wasn't expecting that ending actually.
Review on my blog at Here.
July 2, 2021
My son would give it a medium rating because it was exciting but also kind of scary. He thinks third graders wouldn’t be scared, but the ending was too scary for him (he’s about to start first grade). I liked that it really engaged my son even though some of the grammar irked me. 🙂
April 11, 2024
I've heard about Deadtime Stories, but hadn't read one until now. I found this one at the library book sale and thought I'd pick it up. It was a crazy little story, but well written and kind of funny. Not as good as Goosebumps, but definitely fun.
February 18, 2018
I had this book around as a kid -- I think it belonged to my brother though, and I'm not sure I actually read it myself. Upon picking it up at a thrift store, I was certain it was knock-off Goosebumps. And it may have been published as that at the time. But this book is about a million times better than Goosebumps. It's just written better. I can't believe Goosebumps found the success it did when it is written so terribly and so many of the scares are fake-outs -- ridiculous fake-outs. There is none of that here. Terror in Tiny Town isn't really spooky, reading it as an adult. But the authors did a nice job making it plausible as opposed to Goosebumps' ridiculousness.
November 1, 2024
I feel like the cover of this book is the biggest lie it tells, and this is a book in which toys come to life and start attacking kids with actual lasers.
The character on the front is clearly meant to be none other than Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky the doll who kills people for increasingly opaque reasons as the series goes on.
However, this character is meant to be Hurley the Hobo, a tiny figure for a model train set, who is, as his name would indicate, a hobo.
Why does this hobo look like Chucky? I guess because that indicates scariness waits within this book’s pages.
But this isn't really the first face I think of when I think of "crazed hobo," the chubby, be-freckled, but also evil, face of a child.
By the way, we're talking about a hobo, here, not a "person experiencing homelessness." This is a fictional character with a bindle, not a dude living in his car because he lost his job last week. Hurley never had a job. He's a plastic figure for a model town that came to life somehow, let’s assume through magic or recitation of voodoo spell or whatever. Hurley, also, is insane and is able to imbue other toys with sentience. Really, his having a home or not is far from the most important thing about him. But you don’t see people named “Cooper” complaining because they don’t make barrels. Goddamn, why did old-timey people make it so complicated? Call the guy “Barrelmaker,” for fucks’ sakes.
Hurley is a gift one of our main kids gets for, I don’t know, his birthday or whatever. He’s got a model city/train set, and Hurley is a figure that is apparently a part of that set.
Is it super progressive or regressive to have a hobo in your model train town? On one hand, he's basically a decoration, but on the other hand, literally every figure in the town is a decoration. It's not like the guy with the top hat and monocle is highly respected by a child with a model train while Hurley the Hobo exists to be pointed and laughed at. And it DOES bring up some uncomfortable questions. Why WOULDN’T a model city have someone experiencing homelessness? Isn’t it erasure to leave him out? The politics of model train towns are complicated. Fortunately, I have adopted the drama-free hobby of collecting old Tin Tin comics. No problems I can see on the horizon!
Basically, Hurley is alive, rallies the other fake townsfolk and brings them to life somehow, and they have a revolution of some kind because they want…something. I’m not sure exactly.
Hurley becomes like a sort of town mayor, he says he’s seen “this situation” “many times” and that the citizens of tiny town need to strike back against the humans. Which brings up MANY questions, NONE of which is really answered.
We also get a scene where a cookie monster is brought to life by being tied to the train tracks and electrocuted, which had me wondering about this whole thing. Is this how ALL the residents came to life? Is this how Hurley came to life? How did Hurley end up for sale at a hobby store after being brought to life?
After the toys start coming to life, the boys try to film everything for proof using dad’s camcorder, and it doesn’t work. Dad gets all pissy and is like, “This is not a toy, it’s an expensive piece of equipment.” Uh, sorry, Dad, it is a toy. It’s totally a toy. Dads with camcorders in the 90s never wanted their kids to touch them, but their kids were the only ones who would ever use them. It was such a paradox. Dads wanted to have video cameras, but never wanted them to be used, so there they sat in closets all over America.
It’s very possible that most dads were using them to film themselves having sex. I can’t rule out that possibility. It seems VERY likely because, I mean, as an adult, you can only film so many things unless you’re going to embarass yourself trying to make a movie. You can film bullshit like soccer games and birthdays, but after that, it’s like…well, me railing my wife seems like a good use of this technology. Creating a video of that, which nobody really wants to see, the most likely viewers of which will be my own kids, on accident, that seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Sex is bad enough when it’s just me and one other person experiencing it. Why would I create a vector for others to experience it by proxy?
At some point, all the toys come to life and we have kind of a Small Soldiers situation. But there’s no consistency. Helicopters are shooting beads or toothpicks or whatever, so projectiles they’d have access to as opposed to missiles, but also they are capable of flight? A dragon, who can also fly, shoots actual fire? Why can a dragon create actual fire and a helicopter cannot create missiles? NONE of this is explained, you’re just meant to accept it, I guess, but I would prefer a little more logic to this.
The boys eventually figure out that water will kill the toys through electric whatever the fuck, and so they get out super soakers and start blasting, which IS kind of every boy’s fantasy in the 90’s, that water guns would become real deadly weapons somehow and you could run around the house with neon water pistols and say action movie lines like, “Cool off,” and “This oughta make you wet.”
There’s also a pretty good moment where one boy is out of ammo and spits on the other boy’s face because he’s being attacked by an alien. Which, that’s a 10 out of 10, nicely set up moment.
They eventually defeat a bunch of the toys with the sprayer on the sink, another quintessentially 90s object that is allegedly not a toy and is 100% a toy.
The book ends with the boys on the real, human-sized train, headed to the friend’s house, and Hurley, a real-sized Hurley, is asleep on a bench at the station. At the last second he jumps on the train and the conductor says, “Next stop, Tiny Town.”
I don’t know what this means, but I guess it means that Tiny Town is real now? Or something?
Whatever.
The character on the front is clearly meant to be none other than Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky the doll who kills people for increasingly opaque reasons as the series goes on.
However, this character is meant to be Hurley the Hobo, a tiny figure for a model train set, who is, as his name would indicate, a hobo.
Why does this hobo look like Chucky? I guess because that indicates scariness waits within this book’s pages.
But this isn't really the first face I think of when I think of "crazed hobo," the chubby, be-freckled, but also evil, face of a child.
By the way, we're talking about a hobo, here, not a "person experiencing homelessness." This is a fictional character with a bindle, not a dude living in his car because he lost his job last week. Hurley never had a job. He's a plastic figure for a model town that came to life somehow, let’s assume through magic or recitation of voodoo spell or whatever. Hurley, also, is insane and is able to imbue other toys with sentience. Really, his having a home or not is far from the most important thing about him. But you don’t see people named “Cooper” complaining because they don’t make barrels. Goddamn, why did old-timey people make it so complicated? Call the guy “Barrelmaker,” for fucks’ sakes.
Hurley is a gift one of our main kids gets for, I don’t know, his birthday or whatever. He’s got a model city/train set, and Hurley is a figure that is apparently a part of that set.
Is it super progressive or regressive to have a hobo in your model train town? On one hand, he's basically a decoration, but on the other hand, literally every figure in the town is a decoration. It's not like the guy with the top hat and monocle is highly respected by a child with a model train while Hurley the Hobo exists to be pointed and laughed at. And it DOES bring up some uncomfortable questions. Why WOULDN’T a model city have someone experiencing homelessness? Isn’t it erasure to leave him out? The politics of model train towns are complicated. Fortunately, I have adopted the drama-free hobby of collecting old Tin Tin comics. No problems I can see on the horizon!
Basically, Hurley is alive, rallies the other fake townsfolk and brings them to life somehow, and they have a revolution of some kind because they want…something. I’m not sure exactly.
Hurley becomes like a sort of town mayor, he says he’s seen “this situation” “many times” and that the citizens of tiny town need to strike back against the humans. Which brings up MANY questions, NONE of which is really answered.
We also get a scene where a cookie monster is brought to life by being tied to the train tracks and electrocuted, which had me wondering about this whole thing. Is this how ALL the residents came to life? Is this how Hurley came to life? How did Hurley end up for sale at a hobby store after being brought to life?
After the toys start coming to life, the boys try to film everything for proof using dad’s camcorder, and it doesn’t work. Dad gets all pissy and is like, “This is not a toy, it’s an expensive piece of equipment.” Uh, sorry, Dad, it is a toy. It’s totally a toy. Dads with camcorders in the 90s never wanted their kids to touch them, but their kids were the only ones who would ever use them. It was such a paradox. Dads wanted to have video cameras, but never wanted them to be used, so there they sat in closets all over America.
It’s very possible that most dads were using them to film themselves having sex. I can’t rule out that possibility. It seems VERY likely because, I mean, as an adult, you can only film so many things unless you’re going to embarass yourself trying to make a movie. You can film bullshit like soccer games and birthdays, but after that, it’s like…well, me railing my wife seems like a good use of this technology. Creating a video of that, which nobody really wants to see, the most likely viewers of which will be my own kids, on accident, that seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Sex is bad enough when it’s just me and one other person experiencing it. Why would I create a vector for others to experience it by proxy?
At some point, all the toys come to life and we have kind of a Small Soldiers situation. But there’s no consistency. Helicopters are shooting beads or toothpicks or whatever, so projectiles they’d have access to as opposed to missiles, but also they are capable of flight? A dragon, who can also fly, shoots actual fire? Why can a dragon create actual fire and a helicopter cannot create missiles? NONE of this is explained, you’re just meant to accept it, I guess, but I would prefer a little more logic to this.
The boys eventually figure out that water will kill the toys through electric whatever the fuck, and so they get out super soakers and start blasting, which IS kind of every boy’s fantasy in the 90’s, that water guns would become real deadly weapons somehow and you could run around the house with neon water pistols and say action movie lines like, “Cool off,” and “This oughta make you wet.”
There’s also a pretty good moment where one boy is out of ammo and spits on the other boy’s face because he’s being attacked by an alien. Which, that’s a 10 out of 10, nicely set up moment.
They eventually defeat a bunch of the toys with the sprayer on the sink, another quintessentially 90s object that is allegedly not a toy and is 100% a toy.
The book ends with the boys on the real, human-sized train, headed to the friend’s house, and Hurley, a real-sized Hurley, is asleep on a bench at the station. At the last second he jumps on the train and the conductor says, “Next stop, Tiny Town.”
I don’t know what this means, but I guess it means that Tiny Town is real now? Or something?
Whatever.
July 30, 2023
Willy's miniature train set and big accompanying town comes to life after a thunderstorm. Willy and his friend Zack keep seeing toys where they aren't supposed to be. It soon becomes apparent that the tiny people of Tiny Town are plotting a revolution! They are being egged on by new toy Hurley the Hobo. Soon, the toys are engaging in all-out war with the two boys.
Enormously entertaining Goosebumps knock-off that delivers lots of fun and action without that series' constant cliff-hanger chapter endings. The plot reminded me quite a lot of the film Small Soldiers, although this was published two years before that movie was released. Of course, you won't find anything really deep here, but you will get a real fun, fast-paced ride that barely stops to take a breath. This was an enjoyable dollop of middle-grade horror that briefly lifted me out of this year's reading slump.
Enormously entertaining Goosebumps knock-off that delivers lots of fun and action without that series' constant cliff-hanger chapter endings. The plot reminded me quite a lot of the film Small Soldiers, although this was published two years before that movie was released. Of course, you won't find anything really deep here, but you will get a real fun, fast-paced ride that barely stops to take a breath. This was an enjoyable dollop of middle-grade horror that briefly lifted me out of this year's reading slump.
April 12, 2024
A surprisingly fun read with a unique story. Though the story shares a lot in common with the Goosebumps Chillogy episodes, it has its own stuff that I really liked. Hurley the Hobo was a cool villainous character, and the tiny town idea is cool and some of the other neat characters there are, well, neat. The characters were okay and the plot is basic but still really fun. I really liked the ending, and I’d even argue it’s one of the best endings I’ve read in a long time. The writing was a bit iffy at times but it’s overall good. Some stuff is a little too goofy in the book, and the horror element feels like it was dropped after 40 pages, which sucks. Still really good though, 8.5/10 is my rating. And remember: if Mookie Monster tries to eat your butt, scream and run. Yes, that’s from the book.
July 23, 2024
Not bad.
April 17, 2025
I’m torn on this. I liked certain aspects but I didn’t love it. Unsure if I’ll keep or trade it
January 30, 2016
Scary, funny and terribly addicting. I HAD to read them all. Each book is independent of the others so no need to read them in order either. So don't panic after you've read the first and two is out...just move on to another and pick it up later.
May 31, 2008
It is a wonderful story that is made to be read on a scary night. Believe me, I have done it and three words about that: you'll love it.
November 3, 2009
Old Children's Book. Liked it as a kid, but haven't read it in years.
August 26, 2014
Cute kids horror book series, but this one didn't blow me away, I will try another in the series soon :)
April 23, 2014
I absolutely loved this book! I haven't read it since a kid but I have forever remembered how creepy/scary it is. Will definitely always be one of my favorites!
August 2, 2016
Review by T.B.: "I liked this book cause it left me hanging and gave me chills."
Read
October 15, 2016it's a good book if you like the goosebumps genre type books
January 29, 2017
I loved it! Easy read, and full of adventure. Much better than I expected!
September 18, 2007
THIS BOOKS MAKES YOU WONDER AND WANT TO CONTIUE TO READ!!!! ITS GR3AT
January 29, 2016
Damn, that's an unappealing cover.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews